Monday, October 20, 2014

Either Praise the Police, or Shut Up

"Don't just touch your chin -- bang it, man, bang it!"

Following Alexander the Great’s
conquest of Persia, members of the Persian elite were required to prostrate
themselves before their new ruler. Polyperchon, one of Alexander’s generals,
sternly rebuked one of the Persians whose self-abasement was seen as
inadequate.

Police union commissar Patrick
J. Lynch displays more than a hint of that attitude in dealing with a public
that at long last has become disgusted with routine and impenitent criminal
corruption on the part of the state’s consecrated dispensers of violence.

For Lynch – whose views are very
commonplace in law enforcement – any attitude toward police other than abject,
servile gratitude is unacceptable, and perhaps even criminal. This is true even
of those who preface modulated discussion of unambiguous criminal misconduct
with the familiar disclaimer: “Not all cops are bad.”

“Proclaiming that `not all cops
are bad’ implies that rational people might somehow believe the opposite,” Lynch
whined in a recent column for the New
York Post. “It lends cop-haters a credibility they don’t deserve. And
it minimizes the dedication and professionalism that police officers display,
day in and day out, by implying that it’s the exception rather than the rule.”

Tax-feeders' mouthpiece: Lynch.

From Lynch’s perspective, sycophancy
toward the licensed purveyors of violence is a civic obligation, and the public
has a duty to sustain the pretense that every single police officer is a
divinely commissioned instrument of justice and the distillate of valor.

Lynch demands that the public accept
the proposition that “all cops put their lives on the line to protect all New
Yorkers.” The NYPD formally repudiated that claim in
its official reply to a lawsuit filed by the heroic Joseph Lozito, who was
cut to ribbons while taking down crazed serial killer Maksim Gelman in a subway
car as Officer Terrance Howell cowered behind a glass partition.

Howell was hailed as a “hero,”
and the NYPD deflected Lozito’s lawsuit by insisting that “under
well-established law, the police … have no special duty” to protect an
individual citizen.

For cops, “officer safety” is
always the prime directive. Lynch would contend that the public must embrace
Howell as a hero because of his occupation – or, failing that, stifle any criticism
of his behavior. Extolling
him as a heroic exemplar is acceptable; describing him as an anomalous “bad
apple” is not.

According to Lynch, police are
victimized by an invidious double standard. After all, “when a patient dies on
the operating table under dubious circumstances, elected officials don’t rush
to reassure the public that not all surgeons are incompetent. If an airline
pilot is caught drinking before take-off, TV talking heads don’t remind us that
the majority of pilots are sober.”

Leaving aside the fact that the
mechanisms of professional accountability for surgeons and pilots are much more
demanding than those that exist in law enforcement, the most obvious problem
with Lynch’s desperate analogy is that people in those professions are actually
rendering a service to the public. Police
have no enforceable duty to do likewise.

Doctors help their patients; pilots
safely convey passengers to their chosen destinations. Private security
personnel defend persons and property. For people in those professions, success
is measured in terms of positive outcomes for paying customers, and failure is
recognized as either unavoidable misfortune or culpable incompetence.

For police officers, by way of
contrast, “success” results when those targeted in displays of
government-sanctioned violence either submit or are subdued, often with lethal
consequences – even when the recipient of that violence did nothing to warrant
such treatment.

What should police do, Lynch
complained in a recent press conference, “when we’re faced with a situation
where the person being placed under arrest says, `I’m not going. I’m not being
placed under arrest.’ What is it we should do? Walk away?”

If the arrestee wasn’t involved
in an actual crime – and there’s no evidence that Garner had done anything
other than embarrass plainclothes officers by breaking up a fight – then the
inescapable answer is: Yes, the police should walk away.

“We don’t have that option,”
Lynch asserts – which means that officers are entitled to “use necessary force
to make that arrest.” In the case of Eric Garner, this included the use of an
illegal chokehold by Officer Daniel Pantaleo, which resulted in a criminal
homicide. “There is an attitude on our
streets today that it is acceptable to resist arrest,” grouses Lynch. “That
attitude is a direct result of a lack of respect for law enforcement.”

Actually, that attitude is in
large measure a reflection of the ever-escalating lawlessness of the government
employees represented by Lynch and his comrades. It may also reflect a growing
appreciation for the fact that resisting unlawful arrest — while considered a
crime, and prosecuted as if it were — is an ancient,
venerable, and indispensable right of free people. Under the still-valid
Supreme Court precedent John
Black Elk v. U.S. (1900), a citizen has a legally recognized right to use
lethal force to prevent the consummation of an unlawful arrest, and bystanders
likewise have a right (and perhaps a moral duty) to intervene on behalf of the
victim.

Like other agencies of its kind,
the NYPD is well-stocked with the kind of privileged bullies who have mastered
the art of simultaneously swaggering and simpering. Thus anonymous NYPD sources
described
anti-police graffiti to the New York Post as “a disturbing hate crime.”

Through video surveillance, the
NYPD identified 36-year-old Rosella Best as the culprit.
Best tagged police vehicles and a public school with graffiti expressing such
eminently defensible (if grammatically awkward) sentiments as “NYPD pick on the
harmless,” “NYPD pick on the innocent,” and — in a display of familiar but
increasingly justified hyperbole — “NAZIS=NYPD.” (Assuming that Ms. Best used
only “public” property as her canvas, it’s difficult to identify an actual
victim in this case.)

Best was charged with “criminal
mischief as a hate crime.” Under
Article 485 of New York Penal Law, a “hate crime” must involve “violence,
intimidation [or] destruction of property” inspired by animus toward people on
the basis of “race, color, national origin, ancestry, gender, religion,
religious practice, age, disability, or sexual orientation.”

Absent from that
inventory is any mention of occupation as a “protected category,” which means
that the NYPD must consider itself to be either a tribe, a cult, or perhaps
even a sexual orientation, most likely one that fetishizes sadistic mistreatment
of the helpless.

The statute also specifies that
the offending act must be intended to “inflict on victims incalculable physical
and emotional damage” and be intended to “intimidate and disrupt entire
communities….” By filing a hate crimes charge against Ms. Best, the NYPD is
certifying that its rank and file consists of people who are wounded and
intimidated by public criticism. If the bold and valiant badasses of the NYPD
must be protected from hurtful words, they’re obviously not the kind of people
who “put their lives on the line to protect all New Yorkers,” as Patrick Lynch
would have us pretend.

All police officers embody “selflessness
and courage,” Lynch maintains – but there is one “nightmare” that burdens their
waking thoughts and holds sleep in abeyance: Accountability.

“We have watched in disbelief as
the worst nightmare a police officer can have comes true,” wailed retired Jersey
City Police Officer Robert Cubby in
a post at LawEnforcementToday.com, referring to the prospect of criminal
charges against Daniel Pantaleo for killing Eric Garner. “An NYPD officer applied what was falsely
called a choke hold. Moments later, the perpetrator gasped for air and died in
the hospital.”

These two developments, Cubby
would have us pretend, were not necessarily related. It’s not that Garner’s
government-employed assailants killed him; he just chose that particular moment
to die.

Now that the death of Garner —
who was not a “perpetrator” of any sort, once again, but rather a man who had
just broken up a fight — has been ruled a homicide, the “career of those
involved from the NYPD dangles from a thread,” moans Cubby. “The officers face
the worst possible nightmare; loss of their career and being thrown in jail for
a good portion of the rest of their lives.”

The same would be true of
anybody else who fatally assaulted another human being without cause. Cubby and
people of his ilk assume that police officers must be beyond accountability for
such actions, and that the loss of their exalted station as dispensers of
lethal force is a fate worse than death.

“While these officers now become
defendants and have to, somehow, gather enough emotional strength to get
through this horrible accusation [and] gather all their financial resources to
defend themselves, stay out of jail and retain their jobs, it is time for the
LEO family to support our NYPD brothers and sisters,” insists Cubby. He
suggested that members of the state’s armed enforcement class display their
solidarity with Garner’s killers through a “United We Stand with NYPD” social
media campaign: Law enforcement officers and their friends were urged to change
their Facebook profile picture to an upside-down NYPD flag. That green, white,
and blue banner, which was adopted by the department in 1919, is draped over the
coffins of officers who are killed in the line of duty.

After all, if a costumed
tax-feeder can’t kill without consequence, what’s the point of living?

Cubby’s suggestion, it should be
pointed out, was made before the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri
last August – which led to protests, riots, and a Fallujah-grade crack-down by
fully militarized “local” police. The well-publicized conduct of the police in
Ferguson finally forced the public to confront what the police have become.
This, in turn, helped propagate an epidemic of institutional self-pity within
law enforcement, and Lt. Daniel
Furseth of Wisconsin’s DeForest PD came down with a particularly severe
case.

“Today, I stopped caring about
my fellow man,” begins Furseth’s
October 14 essay in American Police Beat Magazine. “I stopped caring about
my community, my neighbors, and those I serve. I stopped caring today because a
once noble profession has become despised, hated, distrusted, and mostly
unwanted.”

Furseth, like Lynch, is
disillusioned not because of what their profession has become, but because of
how it is perceived by an ungrateful public that is proving itself unworthy of
their sanctified overseers. Furseth also seems deaf to the implications of his
own overwrought, self-fixated rhetoric: If he stopped “caring” about the people
he “serves,” shouldn’t he resign? Or is he admitting to being a state-licensed
sociopath with permission to inflict violence on a public he now views with
unfiltered scorn and unalloyed resentment?

“I stopped caring today because
parents tell their little kids to be good or `the police will take you away,’
embedding a fear from year one,” complains Furseth, offering a variation on
Lynch’s complaint that even people who respect the police understand that they
are agents of violence. He likewise condemns those who quite correctly describe
the police as “just another tool used by government to generate `revenue.’”

In offering that particular complaint,
Furseth reveals himself to be either incurably disingenuous, or a stranger to
the concept of irony.

DeForest, Wisconsin is a town of about
9,000 people located not far from Madison, the state capital. It is roughly
91 percent white and has a crime
rate less than one-third the national average – and a violent crime rate so
low it doesn’t make the needle twitch. Revenue collection through traffic
enforcement and OWI (Operating While Intoxicated) “saturation patrols” are the
chief functions of that police department.

The
DeForest PD’s 2013 Annual Report smugly observes: “One individual stated
the following on a social media site: `Dude, I refuse to drive into DeFo with
anything remotely illegal in my car, it seems like there’s a cop on every
street.’”

That’s a sensible precaution,
given that the “friendly” people responsible for that state of affairs are not
only doing everything possible to wring revenue from visitors, but are also
obsessively monitoring social media.

“We represent a `Police State’
where `Jackbooted badge-wearing thugs’ randomly attack innocent people without
cause or concern for constitutional rights,” laments Furseth. “We are Waco,
Ruby Ridge, and Rodney King all rolled into one….”

Notably absent from his jeremiad
is any acknowledgement, however qualified or tentative, that the perception he
laments could possibly be justified. If he possesses so much as a particle of
principled concern for the rights of innocent people, Furseth will reach beyond
his privileged peer group and offer support to a local family who suffered
horribly “without cause or concern for
constitutional rights” in a 3:00 a.m. no-knock SWAT assault.

DeForest is about a half-hour
from Madison, which
is where the family of Bounkham Phonesavanh – more commonly known as “Baby
Bou-Bou” --resides. The 20-month-old
child was nearly murdered by police in Georgia last May 28th during
a 3:00 no-knock SWAT raid. Acting on the basis of purchased intelligence from a
petty criminal, the raiders attacked the home without warning, hurling a
flash-bang grenade into the living room. The infernal device exploded in
Bou-Bou’s crib, blowing off his nose and ripping open his chest.

The Phonesavanh family was
residing temporarily with an aunt in Georgia. The parents weren’t suspected of
any criminal conduct – but this didn’t prevent the invaders from assaulting the
father, leaving him with a permanent shoulder injury. No drugs or other
evidence was found at the home, nor was the relative suspected of drug dealing.

Just move on: Sheriff Terrell.

The tiny victim was still in a
medically induced coma when Habersham County Sheriff Jerry Terrell officially
exonerated the officers who had nearly murdered him: “I stand behind what our
team did. There’s nothing to investigate, there’s nothing to look at.” Public
outrage eventually led to a Grand Jury inquest, which did little more than
ratify the sheriff’s claimsFollowing a six-day
investigation, the
Grand Jury declined to indict the law enforcement officers who participated in
that atrocity.

The
prologue to the grand jury’s “Presentment” is five pages of frothy
self-justification and pious persiflage emphasizing the public-spiritedness of
the panel and extending sympathy to both the victims and perpetrators of this
atrocity.

“Nothing can be more difficult
and heart-wrenching than injuries to one’s child,” the document asserts, before
suggesting that inflicting
such injuries can be just as traumatic to the exalted instruments of state
coercion who nearly killed Bou-Bou: “[W]e wish to extend our sympathy also to
the law enforcement officers involved… [W]hat has not been seen before by
others and talked or written about, is that these individuals are suffering as
well.”

That “suffering,” like the
nearly fatal injuries to Bou-Bou, came after an investigation that was
“hurried, sloppy, and unfortunately not in accordance with the best practices
and procedures.” This wasn’t “criminal negligence,” mind you, but simply the
regrettable result of “well-intentioned people getting in too big a hurry, and
not slowing down and taking enough time to consider the possible consequences
of their actions.”

This assessment might be
appropriate in describing the distracted and inattentive cook who sets fire to
a stove. Applying it to people who carried out an unjustified 3:00 a.m. military
assault that left an infant fighting for his life is an obscenity.

The most abhorrent passage in
this document comes on page 13, where “the parents and extended family” of the
victim are cut in for a share of the blame, because they supposedly “had some
degree of knowledge concerning family members involved in criminal activity
that came in and out of the residence.” Bou-Bou’s parents had taken refuge with
relatives in Georgia after their home in Wisconsin was burned down. They weren’t
implicated in the alleged wrongdoing of their relative; they were simply
desperate for a place to live.

Bou-Bou’s parents, who moved
back to Wisconsin in July, have been saddled with more than $1 million in
medical bills. After initially promising to help defray those expenses,
Habersham County officials — displaying the selective, self-serving
fastidiousness for “law” that is so typical of tyrants and bureaucrats — now insist that it
would be “illegal” to do so.

Daniel Furseth is a neighbor to
the Phonesevanh family. He ends his essay with a
self-dramatizing flourish: “Yes, I stopped caring today. But tomorrow, I
will put my uniform back on and I will care again.”

By doing so, however, Furseth
would acknowledge that decent people have abundant reason to look upon the
police with fear and suspicion – and this is a concession he probably cannot bring
himself to make.

13 comments:

JdL
said...

There's no one who can form a sentence like you, Will! This is my favorite: "... which means that the NYPD must consider itself to be either a tribe, a cult, or perhaps even a sexual orientation, most likely one that fetishizes sadistic mistreatment of the helpless." Har!

Of course, even as I laugh at your expert verbal slicing and dicing, I know that the terrible reality remains after the laughter stops. Thanks, as always, for bringing it into view. Just linked to this from the latest column at Carlos Miller's PINAC; hope you'll get some hits!

Ditto JdL, If you're impressed with Will's writing (as i have been for some time), you'll be awe stricken by his rhetorical acuity - i often catch him been interviewed by the great Scott Horton (radio guy not the other great Scott Horton the lawyer).

Exquisitely written! Just the right amount of everything! I only hope these blind jack boots have a chance to read this wonderful work! The only answer is to END the socialized delivery of protection services and move to a free market subscription based system of policing and protection, one where the paying customer is in control!

i absolutely agree with 'school...' with respect to market based policing. it is beyond time that such a move be completed.

the 'kill/maim/hurt/bully' caste will see things differently, of course, since the vast majority of them will no longer have a job under such a system given their 'capo' (as used by jews in concentration camps to refer to 'one of their own' who betrayed them daily) mindset.

i will not hold my breath for such a change in the near future, though. the authoritarians and their bleating sheep supporters are far too numerous at present for any meaningful change to take place now. on the other hand, given all that is transpiring with the rising groundswell of anger, the days of policing in the present form are definitely limited. this is a good thing...avery good thing.

Wow. This is a damn well written and thoughtfully composed treatise on a subject that disturbs me more and more each day. This country is becoming a police state and the 'sheeple' continue to elect those who support the horrendous acts described in your article and more. I'm a middle aged middle class white guy; the type who is constantly purported to support 'law and order' but my peers better wake up and realize that the things the cops are doing to 'those people' will eventually be the things they are doing to YOU, skin color is not the issue; the sanctioned use of excessive force and government imposition under the guise of 'public welfare' is the goal. When white soccer moms start getting killed (and it's very assuredly coming) then an outcry will occur. Sad but true. Don't hate cops (mostly), hate lawmakers.

To Anon 9:09PM"Hate lawmakers" . . . yes, assuredly. They legislate into existence bad law (mala prohibita) and empower the uniformed apes to ram it down your throat. "Don't hate cops" . . . couldn't disagree more! As Gore Vidal said in "Death In The Fifth Position": "There is something about The State putting the power to bully into the hands of subnormal, sadistic apes that makes my blood boil." Or as Bill Buppert writes at Zero.gov: "In the end, the police are THE existential threat to human liberty; no political actor could deny a single human being liberty or freedom if the enforcer class didn’t exist. None.” The suit-and-tie "lawmaker" enables the ugly process, but it is the traitorous, badged, typically low-moderate IQ official hoodlum that enforces it against his neighbors. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said in "The Gulag Archipelago", indicting not so much the butcher Stalin ("lawmaker") but rather his goon squad security operatives/organs ("cops"): “And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.” It won't be the "lawmaker" that breaks your door in, it will be his hired meathead muscle, the praetorian hog.

Someone has to do the job, and since the majority doesn't want to adhere to the rule of law as it is clearly stated at Article 1, Section 8, Clause 15 of the Constitution, ("execute the Laws of the Union"), this is what we get for our ambivalence, and disrespect for the sacrifices that were made by our Forefathers. I have petitioned my governor to enforce the law as it was established, and asked for support from the community. I've been ridiculed and condemned. So when we complain about the conduct of unlawful agencies, whether or not there are "good" people there or not, we have only ourselves to blame. Learn the law. Speak of the law. Tell your elected representatives that their job is to protect rights not infringe upon them. There is no original tenor, other than judicial fiat, for the fraudulent power of the police. So let's start the conversation that we need. Read Article 1, Section 8, Clause 15 of the Constitution, and the corresponding states constitutional authority. Demand that your state reps or governor enforce that law. In this nation it is the People who are the sovereigns with certain sovereign powers granted to the government. The Authors of the Constitution made that perfectly clear when they created the branch that is the only recognized authority to "execute the Laws of the Union". It cannot be changed by an act, or judicial edict. It can only be changed by the amendment process and our willingness to abdicate our sovereign powers. I believe, with all my heart that Mr. Grigg needs to add that clearly enumerated law to all his articles, as does every other so-called patriot.

Read your analysis of policing in Yakima. We helped organize a DoJ investigation into Portland, Oregon police; and the City now moves forward under a Settlement Agreement. We anticipate hosting a regional convening on civilian authority and police accountability that will include Seattle and Spokane. Was wondering whether you had relationships in Yakima we might network among. Best way to contact us is through the response form at our blog:http://www.consulthardesty.com/about-2/rdh

All who hate cops and law makers should shut the hell up up and shove their bigotry up their asses. We have laws and police for good reason. Without them, crime would run amok. Besides, I'm tired of troublemakers running in the world. And so, I wish that everyone would follow good rules without question forever.

At what point was it established that criticizing people who are supposedly our servants is a form of bigotry?

It's probably gratuitous to point this out, but in the early 1970s, the Police Foundation funded a detailed study in Kansas City to examine the impact of police patrol on the rate of violent and property-related crime. That study determined that there is no measurable benefit. Similarly, there is a long string of court cases establishing the legal principle that the police have no enforceable duty to protect individual citizens from criminal violence.

As an institution, law enforcement exists to protect those who prey on our property rights -- namely, the political class. In that capacity they are owed neither respect nor gratitude.